Thursday #11 – with both Wednesday and Thursday off work this week, I woke up decidedly confused about what day it was. Felt a little like Sunday and somehow also like Friday but definitely not like Thursday. Damn mid-week weekends. After this confusing start to the day it was time to spend half an hour checking my emails – not because I am suddenly Miss Popularity or haven’t checked my emails in a while, but because the bigpond gods have decided (in a decidedly unfestive manner) to slow my internet right down after I allegedly downloaded one too many TV shows this month. Chuggalug. It is a very painful and frustrating time, reminiscent of the late 90s when checking your emails involved a lengthy (and noisy) dial-up process which could be interrupted at any second if someone decided to call your home phone. I am fairly confident our internet billing month ends in a day or two and am sincerely hoping this is true as I don’t think my patience will even last that long.
With that eventually out of the way it was off to The Rocks to meet up with The Wannabe Ranga for some lunch. After some chicken paninis and cold beverages it was time to hit the shops. Not being from Sydney herself, I impressed The Wannabe Ranga with my superior knowledge of the city (superior only to her, most of the time I have no idea where I’m going) as I was able to take her to all the venues she requested – luckily for me her requests were all fairly obvious landmarks. We spent what felt like an eternity in Myer and discovered that the phrase “the customer is always right” is clearly not in their staff training manual. Having started work in customer service 10 years ago, I am well aware of this little saying and often disagree with it completely; thinking a more accurate description would be “the customer is always a tightarse and trying to get something for nothing”. Except on days like today where I AM the customer and I AM right.
Somehow their own incompetency in sticking a barcode on something meant they wouldn’t be able to sell it to me – but not before sending us on a wild goose chase from register to register via a million confusing escalators. We explained that there was an almost identical product (with just a couple of words different) with a barcode and a price on it but that was not good enough for the Christmas Grinches at Myer. After confiscating my present I went back downstairs (after locating the escalators once more) and returned with my almost identical item to then watch the lady spend 5 minutes trying to use this to lookup the one I actually wanted to buy. Rather than apologising for this ridiculous waste of my time, or perhaps thanking me for hand-delivering the product she could use to look it up (since she clearly was not going to trust me when I told her the price); she looked at me like I had somehow made her life more miserable. The Wannabe Ranga and I were fuming over this poor customer service and she pointed out that people that rude should not be dealing with customers – “exactly” I agreed, “that’s why I stopped serving customers years ago”.
When I finally got home I had some dinner with The Marge and then it was tree decorating time. The fake Christmas tree made its way into the lounge room on Sunday and has been looking decidedly bare all week. We finally figured it was time to stick on some baubles, chuck on some beads, hook up some lights and throw a bit of tinsel in the mix (all while listening to Mariah Carey’s Christmas album of course) and voila – it feels a tiny bit more like Christmas. I explained to DTM via skype later that night that The Marge is quite particular about her fake trees and selected this one based on it having “that authentic toilet brush look”. He seemed confused (clearly not a fake tree expert) and had to be reassured that we did not use our Christmas tree throughout the year as a bathroom utensil. I’m really not sure who came out of that conversation sounding crazier.
For what felt like a jam-packed Thursday, in hindsight it was fairly uneventful and full of awkward moments when I realised (and shared with The Wannabe Ranga) that this time a year ago I was hanging out with The Older Man. We both cringed as we recalled the horrific line he had used and more disturbing, the fact that it had worked. Perhaps I should be thankful, for as much as it makes me shudder; “I want to know what your lips taste like” has provided me with lots of laughs over the past year as I’ve found myself retelling the story of a very awkward night in our nation’s capital.
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